Like many in the web-design field, I was a conscript as opposed to a volunteer.
My html was limited, my javascripting was poor, and the concept of LAMP sent me running away from the light. Okay, I’ll be honest. I had no idea what LAMP actually did or how it worked. I wasn’t going to try to find out, either.
The one ace-in-my-pocket was a basic Flash/Actionscripting class that I had taken during my junior year of college. I was always interested in art, and if there’s anything that Flash has proven, it’s that you don’t have to actually know how to draw to use it. You can fake…fake…fake your way to better art.
In the process, I learned how to make things move, and implode, and link to other frames in the same Flash document. Because of this marvelous experience, I automatically became an expert on building a website.
Fast-forward a few years. I have forgotten most of the html I know, and a friend asks me to help her do some simple changes on a website. I get thrown head-first into an ASP site, with a CSS template, a Flash front end, and SQL server thrown in for good measure. The guy who designed it had gone AWOL, and I was left with his mess. It was acronym hell. I managed to fix things, but it was no fun, and I planned on never having to do that again.
In the process, I became an employee at one of her other companies. They were launching a new website, and I was designing and promoting it. You can guess what I used as my primary….nay…my only…medium.
I wasn’t going into it blindly. There would be no tacky “Splash” page. I would have meta-tags
Proper research had been done, and the results all reinforced my opinion: Flash was the way to go.
Oh sure, there were those no-style, CSS
Yeah, they complained about “usability”, “bandwidth”, and “SEO” but who needs that when your menus move. Besides, they were always whining about “cross-browser compatibility” and “workarounds”. You don’t need a “workaround” with Flash. It displays the same thing, no matter what browser you are in.
What unenlightened fools.
I built my awesome site. It was contained in a small SWF file that weighed in at a meager 1.2 MB. My site was up, my PPC campaign was working, people were ordering stuff. My wisdom would forever be proclaimed to the nations of the earth.
3 months went by. I wondered where Google was. I had built it, Google should have come. This was not a Kevin Costner moment (unless that moment was “WaterWorld”). I slowly realized through my research that putting your entire site in one file was a bad idea, because of bandwidth issues and server load.
Then there was that whole SEO thing to consider. Evidently the whiny zealots had a point. Google liked to see more than one page, and when it came to Flash, Google can’t read. Dumb old Google. So I made my separate SWF files, all the while cursing Google for its ignorance. Some seeds of doubt registered in my mind, but I had separate pages now…with meta-tags for each page. Surely I would be on the front page now.
2 more months go by. Still no Google. I realize that I need a sitemap, but the site that will do it for me is just as dumb as Google. On top of that, people with a “balanced” view of Flash sites are saying that I need a sniffer page so that it will redirect the googlebot to a page that contains the links written in a format that Google can understand (That was not a run-on sentence. That was exactly how it sounded in my mind).
1 week later. I learn some CSS, just for the index page. I include some keywords, hand-code some links, and end up with an html front end, with a ton of embedded flash. Finally, I have a sitemap of my 10 pages. Google has come, but it only recognizes my front page, and my site shows up in Google (for the name of my site. great.)
Eventually a random event humbled me. Eolas claimed that Microsoft had infringed on their patents, and now all of my Flash content had an annoying dotted line around it. I had to click twice in IE to activate my content. That did it.
My site was in need of a serious redesign. Instead of having Flash pull my inventory from a text document, I learned how to do a CSS-styled table layout, and switched to a SQL database, with PHP as a middleman. My content was now fully indexable, and actually ranked in Google. I used a javascript solution to embed the remaining Flash content.
I was able to use real SEO theory, and complain about the unfairness of the algorithm. No longer was I invisible. Now I was just unhappy about where I was ranking.
My long tail-rankings began to improve, and I have seen huge results in our SERP’s. We are now in the top 10 for our target terms. Our rankings increased in the two months that I have been reading SEOMoz.
Big surprise there.
Conclusion:
Flash as a method to show art, display video, or showcase a portfolio is a great option. IF it is embedded in a properly-optimised html page, with relevant keywords and headings around it.
It is horrible for SEO, and those who use it will be doomed to constant frustration, incoherent navigation, and a lot of motion that distracts from meaningful content that is present.
To wit, I have embarqued upon a practice-what-you preach redesign of my site. As of the end of next month, my site will be rid of Flash forever. In its place, there will be elegant CSS, intuitive navigation, and a lack of all Flashiness.
If there is one thing that I have learned in all of this, it is this:
There is no substitute for hard work and knowledge. The time you save in doing what you know, will be wasted when you learn that you know nothing.
So, if a young idiot like me comes your way, spouting the virtues of Flash, and laughing at your boring CSS, just smile and nod.
He’ll be a zealot in no time.
